At 52, Korana Doroslovacki has resigned herself to the reality that she’ll never own a home.
Doroslovacki has lived in southern Maine since 2018 and dreams of a space she can call her own, but her hourly wage of $20 and the expensive health care costs related to her Crohn’s disease mean that she’ll likely stay where she is, in a Portland housing project, for good.
“It would be very, very hard for me,” Doroslovacki said. “It’s too expensive.”
Because of prohibitively high home prices in Maine’s largest city, Doroslovacki won’t even apply for a program the Portland Housing Authority administers to help public housing tenants like herself become homeowners. If approved, the agency would cover most of her monthly mortgage payments using a Section 8 subsidy. She would only need to find a home to use it on.
But with increasing home prices, high interest rates and a lack of inventory that define Maine’s current housing market, that program can no longer promise homeownership. No one who has received one of these Portland-area vouchers since 2022 has been able to close on a home, Clyde Barr, the director of Portland Housing Authority’s voucher programs, said.
“The median home price in Portland is $665,000, so none of our buyers can afford the median home price,” Barr said. “We do branch out, but even in Cumberland County, the median home price is [ $565,000].”
It’s a stark reminder of how impossible homeownership has become for low- to middle-income earners in Maine, particularly in southern and metropolitan areas of the state where prices far outpace typical household earnings. You now need to make over $100,000 annually to afford the median Maine home price, which has increased by 62 percent since April 2020, according to the Maine Listings Service. The average household in Maine only nets about $68,000 a year, according to U.S. census data. Prospective homebuyers like Doroslovacki, who works at a gelato store in Portland, don’t even make that.
Housing authorities elsewhere in Maine complain of the same issue, which is also restricting those with rental vouchers from finding an affordable apartment.
None of the three households approved for a homeownership voucher in Lewiston last year were able to find a place to lease, according to Chris Kilmurry, executive director of the city’s housing authority. In Sanford, three voucher holders have been searching for affordable homes in that area to no avail, Diane Small, executive director of Sanford’s housing authority, said.
“It’s really hard to compete with people who have cash and don’t need an inspection,” Small said. “They can go right in and outbid people.”
Voucher recipients are often at a disadvantage even compared to other low-income households when searching for a home, Barr said. Some sellers pass over voucher holders in favor of cash buyers and traditional buyers, who face a more straightforward financing process and take less time to close a sale, he said.
“There’s all these little things at play, and they’re all magnified for very low-income households,” Barr said.
In more rural areas, these homeownership programs are still seeing success. MaineHousing, the state housing authority, manages vouchers for any place in Maine without local agencies and managed to find homes for 50 voucher holders last year, spokesperson Scott Thistle said.
“Remarkably, we’ve kept pace even in this difficult housing market,” Thistle said, adding that it “makes sense” that southern and more densely populated areas of Maine are having issues.
Some housing authorities are looking to create their own supply of homes for voucher holders to close on instead of waiting for the market to cool. In Portland, future affordable housing projects will often include a mix of rental and ownership units, Barr said. Sanford is making use of its local land bank and, like Bangor, transforming vacant or blighted properties into homes that can be sold to low-income families. Already, the housing authority has redeveloped two such homes and is now renovating a third, Small said.
But until more supply comes online or prices come down, owning one’s home remains a pipe dream for public housing tenants like Doroslovacki.
“There is no way to live by myself,” she said.
